Founded in 1451 and said to be the fourth oldest university in the world, the University of Glasgow has admitted to receiving many millions of dollars earned on the blood and sweat of slaves and is now on a programme of reparations that is being hailed as the right move by the Caribbean’s lead advocate for reparative justice, Professor Hilary Beckles.
The Scottish tertiary institution over the weekend acknowledged “that whilst it played a leading role in the abolitionist movement, the university also received significant financial support from people whose wealth at least in part derived from slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
“It estimates the present-day value of all monies given to the university which might have been fully or partly derived from slavery to be in the order of tens of millions of pounds (One pound sterling = US$1.32), depending on the indexation formula,” UG indicated in a statement.
This landmark acknowledgement officially made over the weekend following a report based on a study that the university commissioned, paved the way for the university to embark on a comprehensive agenda of making things right with the descendants of Trans-Atlantic Slavery whose ancestors toiled in barbarically inhumane conditions on plantations producing wealth for slave owners from Brazil through the Caribbean to the American south.
Premier among UG’s reparative plans is creation of a centre for the study of slavery and a memorial or tribute at the university in the name of the enslaved.
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